But as Kent ambled down the street, now barely ten yards from the front door of the rundown townhouse that housed his first-floor flat, something happened. He began to slow down, then came to a stop, looking at one of the parked vehicles just up ahead. It was a white Ford Transit with Renham & Son Carpentry written in bold lettering on the side. Car three.

And in that moment, inexplicably, Andrew Kent seemed to realize that they’d come for him.

He swung round and started running, just as MacLeod’s urgent shout came over the radio, ‘Go! Go! Go!’, and the four cars full of detectives disgorged their loads on to the road in a cacophony of yells and commands designed to immediately cow their target.

The first out of the Transit was DC Dan Grier, all six foot four of him, the young blond graduate destined for the fast track, whose gangly legs ate up the distance between him and Kent within a couple of seconds. But as Grier flung out an arm to apprehend his quarry, Kent turned, swatted it out of the way with one hand, and launched the other upwards into his neck in a clinically accurate chop. As Tina watched aghast, Grier went down like a collapsing pole of beans, while Kent, the shuffling five foot seven nerd, did a surprisingly nimble sidestep which completely wrongfooted DC Anji Rodriguez, who liked to bang on that she’d once represented England Under-16s at netball but who tripped like a rank amateur when she tried to grab hold of him. She tumbled over on her side and hit the tarmac with an audible smack, forming an immediate obstacle to the officers coming behind her, one of whom, DS Simon Tilley, lost his footing as he tried to hurdle over her rolling form, and went down as well.

The whole thing was surreal, like something out of the Keystone Kops. It would have been funny watching Kent take off in the direction he’d come, running down the middle of the road with more than a dozen cops scrambling over one another in hot pursuit, led by a panting, red-faced DCI Dougie MacLeod, if it hadn’t been for the fact that this was a man far too dangerous to let escape.